Labels: Sturm Und Drang Recordings
Review by: MH
This is Sam Marsh’s solo project that was recorded in 1996 and finally getting a posthumous release now in 2013. It is particularly exciting news for me and maybe not that many other people as Sam Marsh was the drummer/singer in Jacob’s Mouse who I absolutely loved as a teenager and this brings back tons of memories. I used to listen to them while doing my paper round for crying out loud. I got £1.60 on a Saturday and £2.50 on a Sunday. By my reckoning it cost me about 2 weekends worth of paper rounds to buy my copy of “I’m Scared” on vinyl. Times were hard. “Fridge” by Jacob’s Mouse is the one and only song I ever learnt to play on my brother’s bass guitar. If only I had stuck with it. I saw them a whole bunch of times in the 90s playing gigs with the likes of Bivouac, Midway Still, Babes In Toyland and Therapy? and vaguely remember their last ever gig which I am pretty sure was in a pub in Farnborough somewhere. One second…maybe it was somewhere nearer to Bury St Edmund’s where they came from. I am sort of sure that he played the last couple of songs with a toilet seat hanging around his neck that someone from Midway Still put there but I might have misremembered that. It might also have been the Mega City Four drummer who had a toilet seat around his neck during their last gig. Who knows? My memories are hazy.
After the demise of Jacob’s Mouse, Sam set up The Machismo’s which was his own project although he did have a couple of others along for gigs. I went to their first ever gig which I am fairly sure was at the Hope and Anchor in Islington. In a similar way to when I first realised that Michael Fish, Ian McCaskill and Wincey Willis actually had legs that you couldn’t see while they read the weather, I remember thinking it looked weird with him standing up playing a guitar instead of sitting down behind a drumkit…although admittedly he did used to stand up for the odd Jacob’s Mouse gig. With the recordings he played everything himself – recording and remixing it too. However, only some of the tracks saw the light of day at the time. There were a couple of 7inches from the 90s that I thought Wiiija Records had put out but having just looked at them they are listed as Recline Vinyl. I also have a CDr of a load of other tracks The Machismo’s recorded. It was a snip at about £2 a couple of years ago. None of those tracks are on here though.
Anyway, whereas Jacob’s Mouse were raucous, loud and discordant, this release from The Machismo’s keeps things more in check and laidback. Sonically this is closer to something like a rougher Odelay-era Beck. It is naturally still fairly rhythm-focussed and grooving like Jacob’s Mouse but has a minor experimental indie sound to it and the vocals are mellow rather than shouty. There are some nice hooky basslines throbbing throughout the ten tracks and acoustic guitar carries through most of the songs. You can definitely notice the similarity to the more experimental side of Jacob’s Mouse that appeared in their latter days particularly in the basslines on songs like “When You Know It’s Real” and “The Storm”. This is a most welcome return for me. It still sounds good and it brings back tons of memories of being a teenager. Seeing bands from those years on the review list is always a good thing for me. “Good Things About To Happen” is a well-crafted collection of songs and I’d definitely be keen on hearing some new stuff surfacing if that is on the cards. Oh, and for grammar pedants, the grammatically incorrect apostrophe in the name is intentional.